


It's All Over but the Crying

by angel_deux



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fallout, Eventual Frank/Karen, F/M, and NYC is The Apple, in which Frank is the Sole Survivor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-07-25 13:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7533907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank Castle went to sleep in 2077, the day the bombs fell. When he wakes up, his family is gone, and he has to learn to survive in the world that evolved from the ashes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Atom Bomb Baby

**Author's Note:**

> So I was playing Fallout a few months ago, and realized how much Frank's storyline matched up with the Sole Survivor, and then I wrote a thing. Other than the backstory, none of the characters are really supposed to match any of the game characters, but i tried to nail down the overall vibe of both the game and the show, so I hope you like it! 
> 
> I think if you've never played Fallout, this should still be pretty followable? The only important thing to note is that everything in Fallout has a futuristic '50s aesthetic. So when I say Frank looks like a Greaser fuck, I really mean it.
> 
> Karen will appear in the next chapter (rather than slamming you with like 15k words I figured I'd break it up into chapters this time!)

Going to war was supposed to make a difference.

It was the Last War. The Great War. The war that was supposed to help right all the wrongs committed way back, a hundred years ago. _2077_ , the propaganda posters proclaimed. _The year that peace was forged with blood!_

Frank knew better. Knew better the whole damn time because Maria never let him forget it. He went off to war with a warning at his back, and whenever he logged on to his terminal to read her messages, he found words from underground newspapers, their articles copied and pasted to him in attachments titled things like “pregnancy bump!” and “mom’s birthday!” All of them said the same kind of thing. Anti-propaganda propaganda. He scoffed at Maria’s boldness. Deleted the messages so his superiors wouldn’t see. Read through them first, though.

It wasn’t that he believed peace was possible. If he did, it was in a foolish, halfhearted sort of way. The way he started getting after a few beers with his wife curled up next to him on the sofa. Idyllic. Naïve. But if peace could be achieved, wasn’t it worth it? Wasn’t all his suffering, all his nights missing his wife, wasn’t it worth it?

For a little bit after the fighting stopped, it seemed like it had been.

Maria had a baby, a little girl. Lisa. They bought a nice house in the suburbs. Blue paint. Lawn he mowed every couple of days. Another baby on the way. Rumblings of war all the while, but some nights Maria could even be persuaded to turn off the radio and enjoy the quiet of life outside the city.

The sounds of war never left Frank, never let him feel peace, but he got better at making them shush for a while.

* * *

 

Central Park was his idea.

She never liked to leave the area around their house. They’d paid for a spot in a Vault, and she always worried when they went too far from it that the bombs would end up falling when they were away. But Central Park wasn’t all that long a drive, and it had seemed like a good morning for it.

When the sirens rang out, wailing across the grass, Frank reacted. Grabbed Lisa. Grabbed Maria’s hand. Sprinted after the folk who seemed to have half an idea where they were going. When they got to the Vault in the subway tunnel – Vault 80 – Frank flashed his dogtags, and the guy in fatigues checking peoples’ IDs hesitated. Then let him through.

“They’ll make room, Lieutenant,” he said as Frank passed. In the distance, they could hear the bombs beginning to fall. The whistling whine. The rumbling of approaching thunder.

Frank wondered what was going to happen to the people who didn’t make it past the guy in fatigues. Wondered how long before they overpowered him and forced their way in. Wondered if the guy in fatigues knew he was going to die up there to protect a bunch of rich assholes who probably didn’t deserve half of what that kid deserved.

The whole world was shaking by the time they got into the elevator, and Frank thought the bombs would roast his family where they stood, but they didn’t, and he was fine. He was fine. He was alive. And they descended down into the earth, where the bombs wouldn’t find them.

* * *

Maria was sobbing when they met Colonel Schoonover, who cooed over baby Lisa and let her play with his glasses. The Colonel was good at handling people. That was his job. He told Frank that everything would be all right. He handed Maria a tissue to dry her tears. He gave them their vault jumpsuits, told Maria she looked lovely when she changed into hers – made the shapeless blue fabric sound downright figure-flattering. Teased Frank about his jumpsuit being too tight on account of the muscles.

Only later would Frank realize that the man never answered a single question. Then again, what would Frank have done? Wasn’t like they had a lot of choice.

All the people who had come down in the elevator before them were all being led into pods. Little individual pods, like little showers. Claustrophobic looking, and Frank locked up, but the Colonel knew just what to say again, and he clamped Frank on the shoulder the way Military men do.

“Just like a set of power armor, eh, son?” he asked.

“What is it?”

“Decon unit. You ever see anything like it in the war?”

“No sir.”

“Well, consider yourself lucky. In wartime, these things mean you’re up shit’s creek. But right now, it’s just a precaution. Make sure you and your family are good to go. It’ll just cycle through, clean you off nice and good. Radiation travels fast, son. We need to be sure.”

Frank didn’t notice how stupid that was until the cryo tube was already freezing, was already putting him to sleep as he stared out the glass, watching it rapidly ice over, watching Maria’s head slump to the side, Lisa held in her arms.

This wasn’t any damn decon unit, was it?

* * *

He can’t move. Can’t do much more than twitch his head a little as he blinks the frost out of his eyelashes.

A man with red hair wipes at his window, peering in. Weird clothes: leather and linen, all beaten down and worn out. Stained with travel and age. Nothing like the neatly pleated pants, the pressed white shirts and sweater vests he saw on most of the guys down here. The man has a machete at his hip, and everything feels _wrong_.

It all happens fast, and Frank doesn’t like to remember the details, even when he can, but he watches them wake up Maria. He watches them shoot Maria in the head when she tries to fight them. He watches them take Lisa, tiny and fragile and still asleep, from her dead mother’s arms. They boot the cryo tubes back up as Frank is fighting to get free, is trying to claw his way out of the darkness even as it fights to overtake him.

* * *

He blacks out again, but then there’s an alarm, and he finally fights his way awake, and the cryo tube opens.

The first thing he does is try to open Maria’s, but it claims a power failure and it won’t budge.

Not that it matters. Her eyes are open and glassy. She’s dead. She’s dead.

He tries to open every single tube, even though they all give him the same message about power failure.

Lisa is gone. Lisa is gone. Maria is dead and Lisa is gone.

And there’s not a single breathing person in this vault with him.

He explores the whole of it anyway. Finds a pistol clutched in the hands of a rotted skeleton with a guard’s uniform hanging in tatters around his bones. Finds a police baton he can clip to his belt. Finds ammo, some bottled water, a pack to keep everything in. In Schoonover’s office, he finds the man’s rotted corpse clutching a pistol and a holotape that contains his last, wavering testament.

Those ‘decon chambers’ were supposed to stay sealed. The vault was supposed to stay sealed. None of them were ever supposed to wake up. Not for hundreds and hundreds of years. But something had gone wrong here, and Schoonover had ended his life rather than deal with the consequences of his failure.  

And here’s Frank. The sole survivor, somehow alive, somehow awake when no one else in this vault made it. He checks every room, every single one of a thousand tubes, and not a single one contains a surviving person.

He considers ending it here. Taking the Colonel’s pistol and the coward’s way out. But Lisa. He remembers the man with the brown, homemade clothes. With the machete. That man has his baby, and he must have come from outside.

Time to go outside.

* * *

Outside is hell, is everything the propaganda films promised a nuclear apocalypse would bring. Crumbling buildings and a sea of grays and browns. Trees that haven’t seen leaves in years, maybe decades. However long he’s been asleep. The grass in the park is brittle, barely more than dust. Far off, through the trees, something’s moving that’s bigger than any animal Frank has ever seen in the city. He’s pretty sure it’s a rat. He’s pretty sure it’s a fucking huge rat.

The first person he meets is an unfriendly son of a bitch who tries to shoot Frank on sight. But Frank has two pistols, enough ammo, and the kind of aim men write marching songs about. Takes three shots to put the asshole down.

Frank tries to question him, but the man dies laughing, a sneer on his lips. Frank lets him, watches him. Wishes that redheaded fuck had killed him instead of leaving him here to deal with all this.

And then he gets to work.

He strips the body of anything useful, just like in war when they’d strip the fusion cores from the power armor of fallen enemies. The unfriendly son of a bitch has a shotgun that could use a little work and a load of stimpacks. Frank only ever saw these things in the infirmaries in the army; he had no idea they ever produced them for civilians. Then again, this one looks homemade. Still, he’s not exactly in a position to be picky, so he tucks it away to use if he gets into a bad enough spot.

There’s some kind of dried meat, too. Frank gnaws at it and sips some water as he crouches over the body like an animal. The guy also has leather armor pieces, but he’s too small, and Frank’s sure they won’t fit. It’s tempting to try and make it work – especially tempting when he thinks of the giant rat he saw earlier – but he doesn’t want to linger. The gunshots echoed loud over the busted up city, and he doesn’t want to know what kind of shit they’ll attract.

He keeps moving. Keeps his head down. Stays sharp. Just like the war.

* * *

It takes him the better part of a day to meet anyone friendly. She’s a tall woman, golden brown skin and God’s most perfect cheekbones. She’s wearing a brown hat and a white labcoat tied with a utility belt, the sleeves hacked off above the elbow. She arches her eyebrows at Frank’s vault suit as Frank approaches. Frank can’t stop staring at the beast she’s leading on an old rope: some kind of bulbous, two-headed cow.

“You look like you’ve never seen a Brahmin before,” the woman says.

“Ain’t never seen a Brahmin before,” Frank admits.

“Where’d you come from? Far as I knew, they had these suckers everywhere.”

“Can I ask you a kinda stupid question?”

“Long as you lower that shotgun, sure.”

Frank does.

“Sorry. Long day. What year is this?”

“Two-seven-seven. Why?”

“Two thousand seventy seven?”

Surely not; that was the year the bombs fell. The last year he remembers.

“Two thousand, two hundred seventy seven. You on a bad Jet trip, buddy?”

Frank’s head spins when he turns to look over his shoulder at the crumbling ruins of what used to be his city.

Two hundred years. Two _hundred_ years.

“Well, fuck,” he finally says. The woman’s looking at him critically, and Frank sees no reason to lie. “I just woke up. Been frozen underground in a vault.”

“How long.”

“Since the beginning. Oh-seven-seven.”

The woman takes her hat off and wipes her brow, letting out a sharp breath.

“Sounds like you could use a drink.”

* * *

Claire Temple is a caravan doctor, traveling through the city from settlement to settlement, seeing to their aches. She hires Frank to be her bodyguard until they get to Hell’s Kitchen, where she has a clinic.

“My last guy ran off with a pretty adventurer duo,” she says with a snort. “Luke always was restless. I got a few people I can hire on in Hell’s Kitchen, but getting there is the issue. Probably take a few days to do it right. Could be weeks, depending. Hit up some of the smaller places on the way. I’ll pay you in caps. Teach you what I can.”

“Caps?”

“Bottle caps. Guess that’s lesson one. Paper money’s useless. It’s Nuka Cola caps now.”

“Christ. Why, though?”

“Why paper money? Who knows?”

“No, I mean…why you helping me?”

If he sounds distrustful, he hardly thinks he can be blamed. The last person he trusted was the Colonel.

“Because I need the muscle, and I’m curious. You’re a two hundred year old man can’t be older than forty.”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight. And I’m a doctor. Not the type to let a man die in the wastes alone if there’s a thing I can do to help. That enough reason for you?”

“Suppose it is, yeah.”

“Now, I can tell you want to ask me something.”

“Suppose I do. You hear things, right? Traveling like you do?”

“That’s right.”

“You hear anything about a group of men with a baby girl? Can’t have been too far ahead of me. Red haired guy. Wears a machete.”

“You just described every one of the Kitchen Irish, my friend. Red hair and machetes is kind of their thing. But little girls? That’s tougher. Irish aren’t into people. Their take is chems.”

“They seemed to need her for something. I don’t know what. I can barely…it’s in and out. Can’t always remember exactly what they said.”

He doesn’t say anything else, and Claire doesn’t ask. From the look on her face, she doesn’t have to.

* * *

She gives him a pile of caps at the next place they stop, a tiny boarded-up place that looks empty until she knocks on a basement window and satisfies a quick call and response. They’re let in through an alley entrance, the weird cow tied up outside, and Claire shoves the caps into his hands and tells him to head up the stairs to a third floor apartment where he can find a guy named Melvin.

“He’ll get you fitted up in some clothes,” she says. “Those vault suits are collectors’ items in a lot of places. Sell it in Hell’s Kitchen quick as you can. Don’t take less than a hundred for it. More, since this one only just opened, and no one else has got one with that number on the back, got it? But you shouldn’t be walking around in it. Raiders’ll kill you just ‘cause but they’ll try extra hard if they see you in that.”

* * *

Melvin is a tall, nervous man who takes Frank’s caps and gives him a whole lot of leather and denim; soft leather jacket, jeans, button up flannel shirt, white t-shirt only slightly worn out. He looks like some kind of greaser fuck when he puts the clothes on, but Melvin tells him he’ll want the layers when it gets cold at night.

The caps were enough to get him a beaten leather chestplate and some leather arm guards, which he takes way too long strapping on. Luckily, Melvin doesn’t seem to notice that he’s clearly never done this.

That was another thing Claire did for him: she told him to be careful who he tells about where he came from.

“People take advantage in The Apple,” she says. “They take advantage everywhere, but there’s a legacy here to uphold. Fast talking is part of our history. You’ll always find someone willing to take what you have right from your hands. Remember that.”

Frank thinks she’s right, and he thanks Melvin in as few words as possible and balls up his jumpsuit in the bottom of his bag.

When he gets out of the dressing room, Melvin claps his hands together once, proud.

“You look great,” he says. “Tell the doc I set you up nice, all right? Maybe she’ll give me a discount on some chems for Betsy.”

Frank isn’t sure who Betsy is, still isn’t sure what chems are, even, so he just nods and murmurs some kind of agreement.

Claire gives him a cursory glance and says he looks much better. She also says she lined up another job for him.

“Ain’t got time for another job,” he says. “You said the Kitchen Irish might have my girl, so I’m going with you to the Kitchen.”

“It isn’t that simple,” Claire replies. She squares off against him as if she’s ten feet tall, and she reminds him of this drill sergeant he had in the academy who scared the shit out of him. “You been asleep for two hundred years, stranger. The world’s different now. Folk are a lot more ruthless than you remember. I got you a job wiping out a den of Lionrats in an old subway station. Good caps, and those old places are full of loot. You might get lucky. When you’re done, you come back here and I’ll take you the rest of the way to the Kitchen. But I’m not gonna take you straight there. You’re liable to get yourself killed doing something foolish, and I won’t be a party to that, all right?”

He nods, not knowing what else to do, and she nods in the direction of a nervous-looking man down the hall, one hand wrapped in bloody, dirty bandages.

“Good. Talk to him. Get started.”

* * *

Frank does the job. Nearly gets his ass handed to him by the Lionrats, which turn out to be those giant rats he spotted earlier in the ruins of Central Park. They’re nasty and mean, but his shotgun serves him well, and he even finds some drifter’s old hideout in the station, loaded with enough caps to buy him a few upgrades from the guy across the hall from Melvin.

He’s feeling pretty good about himself, so he decides to head down the stairs and check out the tracks. That’s a mistake. Then again, Claire could have warned him.

He’s bending over a Nuka Cola machine, almost giddy with amusement when he sees that there’s an unbroken bottle of the soda waiting for him. He pops it open, takes a long drink. It tastes like it might have tasted yesterday, when he was at home with Maria and Lisa and there was nothing wrong in the world.

He leans his hip against the machine, and the police baton clanks against the plastic, and the pile of clothes he thought was another skeleton leaps up, skin burned and bubbling, limbs scrabbling and lanky and hairless. The eyes are enormous, the face puffy with infection and broken skin, ulcers and whatever else on its face.

Frank can’t move. He’s never been so fucking scared.

The thing screams, this guttural, horrible sound, and Frank manages to get his baton up just as it charges at him. It runs like it’s a marionette, all floppy lack of grace, and it’s so fucking funny for a second that he’s laughing even as he strikes out.

Luckily, as fast and as terrifying as that thing is, it still goes down pretty easy. Head bursts open like a dropped egg.

It’s got some ammo clutched in one grubby hand, and an examination of an engineer’s room reveals a whole box of the stuff, plus a workbench with a bunch of weapons modifications lying around. They aren’t in great shape, but he fixes up his shotgun nice and fashions a shoulder belt of shotgun shells to drape over his neck. He grabs a couple of scattered trinkets he thinks might be worth something, shoves them into his bag. And Claire was right about the caps. They’re everywhere.

When Frank Castle came back from the war, he was tired. And that exhaustion seeped into every aspect of his life. He’d be mowing the lawn and then stop suddenly, staring down at his hands and seeing a gun that wasn’t there, and this despair would come over him. What was the point? Not of the war, but of pretending that the war wasn’t happening? Smiling at Maria, trying to teach Lisa to say _daddy_ , watching TV and listening to radio shows. What was the point of it? Building a life that could just be taken away in an instant.

One day in the wasteland, and Frank Castle already feels at home. Like he brought the war with him.

* * *

He gets back to Claire, gets the caps from the nervous man, and Claire tells him that she asked around about the redhaired man. She says there’s an enclave of raiders not too far from here, and he could check it out.

It goes on like that for a while. Easy to forget how fast time moves when you spend most of the day walking from one place to another, killing bad guys and rescuing people who need it. He brings loot back, sells it to Claire, sells it to people he meets along the way, and pretty soon he’s earned more than enough to buy his way into Hell’s Kitchen. He upgrades his armor, trades the leather for a nice fiberglass set that sends Melvin in to raptures when Frank commissions it. He kills more raiders, Irish, and this gang who call themselves Dogs of Hell. He makes a name for himself in The Apple and the surrounding areas. He hears people talking about him. The Punisher.

And the whole time, not one person knows anything about a little girl.

When Claire finally is ready to move on to Hell’s Kitchen, it’s been more than a month. Frank has helped put together three new settlements in the Wasteland, because Claire convinced him that it never hurt to give people something positive to remember. He’s found a new dog, Max, a pitbull and German Shepard mix who follows him loyally wherever he goes and always charges into battle to protect Frank, giving Frank a goddamn heart attack. He’s made friends, though most of those alliances are shaky at best: Microchip, the bizarre hacker who lives in an abandoned military bunker outside The Apple; Jess and Trish, the adventurer duo who stole Luke from Claire; Luke himself, a big man with brute strength who claims to be “part super mutant”, though he speaks in full sentences and looks like a man, and nothing like the bulbous, outrageously huge creatures who occupy most of what used to be Manhattan; and Hogarth, the proprietor of a nightclub called Afterlife in Brooklyn, who is on a one-woman quest to end the slave trade in The Apple, and who promises to keep an ear out for anything about a baby.

He’s sort of given up hope. Not that it isn’t always at the back of his mind, and not that he’s ever going to stop trying, but Claire was right when she said that it was complicated. This isn’t a place where people talk easy, and Frank isn’t friendly enough to get shit out of them. Even Claire has to resort to bribery more often than not.

“What you need is a sweet talker,” she says when they’re on their way to Hell’s Kitchen. She’s decked out in better armor, better clothes. Her Brahmin is loaded down with shit to sell. Their partnership has been good for her.

“I don’t need shit,” Frank argues, tossing a chunk of squirrel to Max, who prances ahead looking pleased like it’s the world’s finest steak. “Already got a partner.”

“You mean me or the dog? Because neither of us count. I got a fixed path through the city. Back and forth. You need to get out there and find your kid, or find and take out the people who took her. You need a partner who’s willing to go as far, and you need a partner who can _talk_ to people. Because neither you nor the dog are any good at it.”

Frank frowns off into the distance, watching the tops of the buildings to make sure there are no snipers. Claire told him this was the most dangerous part of the route. Not quite far enough out for the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen to be patrolling. Just far enough for raiders to think it’s safe. There’s an old corpse hanging from a meat hook from one of the windows, like a reminder.

“You firing me?” he asks. Claire laughs.

“Yeah, baby bird. Spread your wings and fly, or whatever. Anyway, I’ve got someone in mind. Check out Nelson and Murdock’s. Ask for Bullseye. You’ll thank me. Promise.”

They don’t get attacked by raiders. Or super mutants. Or even a Deathclaw. Frank kind of wishes they would. He’s still sort of sore over being fired by the closest thing to a friend he has out here, and he’d love the opportunity to punch something for it. But Claire’s right that he can’t keep ducking out for little trips and then coming back in, coming back to her. He needs to be able to go wherever he wants. And it’s been two months. He doesn’t need her help the way he did at first.

“All right,” he mutters as they reach the gate to Hell’s Kitchen (complete with a ludicrous neon sign made to look like a devil basking in flames). “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Just…keep an open mind, all right?”

“You know me,” Frank says pointedly. And Claire laughs, rapping on the gate to be let in.

“Yeah. Exactly.”


	2. Pistol Packin' Mama

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank meets Bullseye and endures an audition

Nelson and Murdock’s sounds like a law office, but it’s a seedy dive bar, huge and decorated like a kid with a coloring book designed it. All neon flashing signs for things that don’t make sense, like guns, ammo, clothing, waffles. Like whoever owns the place just collected every bit of neon signage they could find and pasted it all over the front of their business.

The inside isn’t much better. All pink and green neon, with fairy lights hanging from the ceiling in delicate loops. These weird chili pepper lights, too, giving the ceiling a mottled, brilliant look. Like low-rent stained glass.

There’s a stage in the center of the room, on which a long-haired man plays piano poorly on some kind of revolving disk, a wide smile on his face, a bowler hat on his head. The audience seems less than interested, but they’re polite enough, applauding when he finishes.

There are tables scattered throughout the place, most of them holding at least one patron half gone. Frank takes it in for a second, confused and ready to rip Claire a new one, before he spots a bartender, a small, lithe woman with tan skin and black hair.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he says when he approaches, and she looks up at him with surprise.

“Aren’t you a polite one?” she asks with dry amusement. “What’ll it be, handsome?”

“I was told to ask for Bullseye.”

The woman wipes her hands on a dirty dishrag, looking him over.

“You looking to hire?”

“Looking for a partner for a job. Was told Bullseye was the guy to see.”

The woman snorts.

“You were told wrong. But take a seat. I’ll see what I can do.”

She hands him a beer with a cheeky promise that it’ll be on the house as long as he doesn’t get too angry if she watches him walk away. He’s befuddled by everything she says, vaguely certain that she’s not seriously flirting with him but unsure enough to make him uncomfortable. He can feel the tips of his ears burning, and he hikes his shoulders up, ignoring her laugh behind him. He takes a seat close to the stage. The beer is shit but he sips it slowly to make it last, because he’s not sure what the fuck else he’s supposed to do.

He’s almost done, almost ready to leave and tell Claire she’s an asshole, when he spots a back door open and two people walk in. One’s an average height man with dark glasses and a walking stick. The other’s a tall, leggy blonde wearing a sparkling red dress.

For about half a second, he genuinely believes he’s looking at Maria.

Her hair is down, lightly wavy the way it was in style when he first went off to war. Her lips are red, deep red, the same shade of lipstick his wife was wearing when she saw him off at the transport and said goodbye. But, no. This woman’s eyes are big and doelike, blue where Maria’s were brown and shrewd. Always made her look a little sarcastic. Maria was shorter, too. A lot shorter. Could tuck her head under his chin.

Still. It takes him a second to get over it.

The dark haired woman goes to them both. Whispers to them. She doesn’t look over at him, but Frank knows she’s mentioning him. His trigger finger is starting to twitch like it hasn’t since he first came home. He doesn’t like this.

The guy from the piano goes over to the blind man and leads him to a table. The blonde woman stands beside them, listening, occasionally bending in to argue. They’re getting heated, but their whispers never carry far enough for him to hear.

He’s about ready to give up and go get Max from Claire and tell her the dog’s a fine enough partner after all, but the blonde breaks away from the other two, walking over. Her dress shimmers with sequins, her hair pulled over one shoulder and bouncy, silky. She walks effortlessly in heels that would give her probably six inches on him if he were standing. She slides into the seat across from him and looks at him appraisingly.

“Didn’t realize this was gonna be a fucking audition,” he says to break the silence. The woman laughs wryly.

“Could be a worse kind of audition.”

“Speaking from experience?” he guesses. It’s the way she plays with the fingers on one hand. Doesn’t quite look at him. He can _tell_ what she’s talking about. Not to mention that what Claire’s told him about this world he woke up in doesn’t leave much to the imagination. This place is sick. This place is broken. This is a place where beautiful women in sparkly dresses aren’t just wearing them to feel nice for themselves.

“Yeah. That a problem?”

“No ma’am. I don’t judge how a person takes care of themselves long as they aren’t hurting anybody. Claire Temple sent me in here, said I could find someone named Bullseye to help me out.”

“Help you out with what?”

“Raiders took my daughter. Not sure who, but Claire seems to think it was the Kitchen Irish.”

“Kitchen Irish is just a name, you know. They started out here maybe fifty years ago. Before my time. Fisk kicked them out when he took over. You’re not gonna find your daughter here.”

“I know that. That’s why I need a partner who can come with me. Gotta ask around outside the city. Outside Claire’s route. She’s fixing to be here a while, and I can’t spend that kind of time. Ain’t good at talking to people, either. Need someone who’s good at it. Charming, like.”

“How old is she? Your daughter?”

“Barely a year.”

“Where’s her mother?”

“Dead. They killed her when they took my girl.”

He doesn’t know why he tells her that. But she holds his gaze when he talks, doesn’t flinch or look away, and he remembers that this woman has probably had a hard enough life that his sob story looks like peanuts compared to hers.

“She’s lucky. Irish have no interest in the slave trade. And a year is too young even to sell. Might be some of the people out at Upper East wanted a kid and hired the Irish to get one.”

“That a thing that happens?”

“Ghouls can’t have kids. Doesn’t stop them from wanting one. More than one smoothskin living in Upper East with ghoul parents. They don’t tend to complain much; nice place, if you haven’t been.”

Frank has no fucking idea what half those words mean, but he shrugs. Pretends like he does.

“Haven’t. Not yet. But that sounds a good place to start, ma’am. Thank you.”

“Karen. Call me Karen.”

“Okay, Karen. I’m Frank.”

“They call you The Punisher, don’t they?”

He frowns at her distrustfully, but she holds her hands out, nice and peaceful.

“Some people have been calling me that, yeah,” he says slowly.

“I thought it might be you.”

On the stage, the blonde man gets back behind the piano, grabs a rusty old microphone. His getup is comically large for him, the vest and button up shirt hanging off him. The pants clamped with a belt but still looking like they’ll fall off.

“Folks, now it’s time for a very special Saturday night special. Our very own Karen Page!”

“Pay close attention, Frank. He’s not lying about this being a special performance.”

She drawls the words with a smile on her face, and he has to look away.

“Why?” he asks, gritted teeth making her smile harder. “What is this?”

Thinking _if she starts taking off that dress on stage, I’m leaving without Bullseye. I don’t give a fuck_.

“ _This_ is an audition,” Karen says. Before he registers it, she’s lifted one of his revolvers and is heading up to the stage in those ridiculous shoes, unwavering, her legs going on for miles. Frank has never been so deeply uncomfortable. “Thanks, Foggy,” she says to the blonde man, kissing him on the cheek and turning to face the audience. She nods to the dark-haired bartender as Foggy starts to play a quiet, jaunty tune on the piano. The bartender flips a switch, and a series of rickety wooden and painted targets descend from the ceiling, all over the room. Karen waits, smiling at the crowd, who all look a hell of a lot more interested now that she’s up there. She leans into the mic, pistol held loosely.

“Three years ago, I was a dancer up north. Some of you might remember me.” There are a few appreciative catcalls at that, and Karen grins, but it’s more feral than friendly. “Well, you can blame Nelson and Murdock for buying my freedom from those slaving assholes.”

Frank hides a snort behind his hand when the catcalls die down to surly embarrassment.

“How come you don’t dance anymore, Karen?” asks Foggy. Hammy enough that the obviously rehearsed lines feel like intentional comedy. And now she _does_ take off the dress, and Frank’s glowering fit to hurt something, but the slinky fabric was hiding a halfway tasteful set of lingerie that serves to expose and draw attention to the hideous scar on her chest. The room is so quiet, Frank swears he hears a radroach scurrying around in the back room. The dark haired bartender looks delighted, her chin in her hands as she murmurs descriptions to the blind man.

“Three years ago, this Kitchen Irish asshole, Lester. He comes into the club where I dance. And he tells me he wants something extra. I give him the price, and he tells me he’ll cut me up if I don’t give it to him for free. Not such an unusual story. You all just tend not to worry about it when you’re paying us and leaving us, knowing the next person could be the last customer. Could be the one who decides a hundred caps is too many, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want it.” She’s spinning the gun slowly on her hand, looking down at it, standing strong and firm, exposed and yet armored. “Lester tried. Shot me when I fought him. And I wrestled that gun away from him, and I shot him back.”

She raises the gun and fires at a target across the room. Dead center, even with this shitty pistol Frank can’t get to shoot straight.

“My _owner_ ,” real resentment, disgust, that echoes through the room and damns all these men watching for having participated in her story. “He said I’d have to pay up for the damages. _You killed Bullseye in my bar_ , he said. _Lots of people will be looking for you now. He had a lot of powerful friends. I’ll need to cut your pay to pay for the protection you’ll need. I’ll need you to get on your knees more often for me_.” Her eyes are tearing up, her voice breaking, but it’s hard to tell if it’s real, because she fires again and looks like nothing has ever fazed her when she turns to look back at the crowd. Another dead center shot. “Killed him, too. Would have killed them all if I hadn’t run out of ammo. _You killed Bullseye_ , they all said. And that’s when I realized, no. No, I _am_ Bullseye. I’m a better shot than that no-talent assassin ever was.”

The next shot is truly impressive, flying through three rings in the ceiling, each increasingly smaller, until it strikes the wall, where a target is painted sloppily.

“Bullseye,” says Foggy, again with the wink-nudge tone, which breaks the mood and has some of the men chuckling nervously. Those with clean consciences, probably. Most remain silent.

“There’s that old saying about tipping your waitresses,” Karen says, one hand holding the gun steady at her side while the other slides up it, feels at it, fingertips prodding it like she’s looking for imperfections. Frank is suddenly embarrassed that she took _that_ gun. Wishes he had offered her a better one. “Well, I have my own spin on it. Treat your dancers with some fucking respect.”

Another shot, this one directly into the crowd, and a man’s beer bottle bursts as he’s lifting it to his mouth to drink. He yelps, and the laughter is louder now, but Frank feels Karen’s tension in his shoulders. He knows she’s not done.

“And now can they do that, Karen?” Foggy asks. “Oh, I’m sorry. I mean Bullseye.”

“Well, for starters, they can leave them alive when they’re done with them,” Karen says. She’s reloading, even though she should still have a few left in the chamber. It’s for dramatic effect, Frank thinks, until he sees that the two bullets she’s slotting in look like they’re painted with a word in gold paint: HOPE. “Unlike my poor friend, Hope Schlottman.”

A man near the back jumps to his feet, his bottle clattering to the ground, his face white, and he’s turning to go, but Karen snaps the revolver closed, and she fires twice, and the man falls to the ground, bullet holes where his eyes used to be.

No one moves. No one breathes. The smell of blood seeps in, overpowering the smoky smell of discharge. And then the dark-haired bartender starts to clap slowly as Karen takes a delicate curtsey.

“She’s not out of bullets yet, folks; I’d clap,” Foggy warns, which gets a laugh out of some of the men, and there’s a smattering of applause. Frank watches Karen’s face as she stares down at the dead man, and he recognizes enough of himself in her expression, in her relief. One less asshole to deal with. One less bad man in the world.

She pulls her dress back on and walks off the stage, dropping the gun onto the table in front of Frank as she sits down.

“You came in on a good night,” she says. “About every three months I get to cross a name off my list.”

“List of men killing working girls?”

“You got it.”

“What’s the finale on nights you don’t get one?”

“Elektra sets up a dummy by the bar. But it’s more impressive when it’s a live body. So? Impressed?”

“You got better clothes to travel in?”

* * *

 

Karen isn’t overly sentimental about leaving, though Frank knows he sees tears in her eyes when she hugs Elektra, Foggy, and the blind man – who turns out to be named Matt, and who also turns out to be vaguely annoyed that she shot the son of a bitch in his bar.

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” she teases. “Murders and all.”

Matt just sighs and hugs her tight.

It’s a lot less fuss than Frank was expecting. Only takes her a few minutes to change out of that dress and into something a little more appropriate. Though in this case, _appropriate_ still makes the skin at the back of his neck turn red.

It’s a simple blue shirt. Or it probably would be a shirt on a giant man, but Karen’s wearing it like a dress, belted with a utility belt slung low on her hips, dotted with pouches for stimpacks and ammo, a holster on one side. She’s got a brown scarf looped around her neck, framing the scar on her chest, the shirt unbuttoned low enough for people to see it. Probably on purpose, he thinks. Covering her miles of pale legs are brown boots that go up to the knee and black stockings torn in enough places that she has to clamp them up with frayed garters.

She rounds off the whole ensemble with a brown militia style hat and a pair of black frame glasses.

She doesn’t wipe off the lipstick or put up her hair. Leaves it long and wavy. She looks like something out of every fantasy he never knew he had. He has trouble looking at her.

* * *

They go to pick up Max and say their goodbyes to Claire, who looks real smug when she sees that Karen is with Frank and ready to go on the road. She gives them both a handful of stimpacks, and some radiation meds in case they come across anything hot.

“You sure about this, honey?” Frank hears Claire asking while he’s repacking his bag.

“He’s no worse than any of the others I’ve dealt with. And you trust him.”

“I do.”

“Then I trust him too. Thank you for sending him my way.”

“Knew you’d stay in that shitty bar forever if I didn’t find you a reason to leave,” Claire says. “Got a lot of names left on your list, sweetheart.”

“More all the time,” Karen replies.

* * *

Their first night on the road, Karen leaves her bedroll open and stretches out by the fire. Waits for him to join her, tense, and Frank doesn’t move. Doesn’t look at her, just keeps watching the flames, and she takes the hint. Looks pleased as punch with him as she curls up to sleep alone, untouched.

Frank hates this world. Wants to tell her to have better standards. Wishes she could afford to.


	3. Right Behind You Baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some snapshots of Frank and Karen on the road

Only time she gets mad at him the first week is when he beats a raider to death with his bare hands.

“He didn’t know anything!” she yells, grabbing his arm and pulling him away from the cooling body. “Frank, stop!”

“ _Why_?” Frank growls back in her face, and she looks frazzled, fragile when she backs away. She takes a few seconds to compose herself, and he does the same, and he wants to apologize for scaring her, wants to quickly cover up the wounds he just made, but he doesn’t say a word.

* * *

That whole first week, actually, they don’t do much talking. And it’s not only because of that time he yells at her. Frank’s just not much of a talker anymore, and she’s too timid to break the silence. Not what he was expecting from her, considering how they met, but he’s not surprised. He knows how he gets. He knows what he must seem like to her.

* * *

He’s the first one who breaks.

“Hey, uh,” he says, testing the ground in front of them with a long stick as they pick their way slowly through this bog. “Sorry I snapped at you.”

“Aren’t exactly the first man who’s ever raised his voice to me,” she says.

“Yeah, I can tell. That’s why I’m sorry.”

He catches her eye so she knows he gets it, and he watches her soften.

“Well, thanks. You’re not the worst.”

He laughs at that, the sound surprising him. It’s the first time he’s really laughed since Maria died.

“You ain’t the worst either,” he admits.

* * *

It’s easier after that.

It all sort of blurs, but things stick out and solidify, like glittering crystals in the everyday dredge of his memories.

* * *

“Careful up there!” he shouts as she rounds another corner in the rickety staircase that leads up to the abandoned shelter. They’d judged it too rusty and poorly constructed for him to try to climb. He hadn’t liked the idea of her going up alone, but she’d laughed in his face when he suggested skipping it entirely. And she was right: the treehouse at the top is big, and who knows what might still be inside.

“Can’t hear you,” she singsongs as she turns another corner. He hears a crack and a shriek, gets ready to try and catch her, not that that’ll do anything but get them both killed, but she manages to skip past the damage and laughs, the sound freeing and lovely, bringing a smile to his face despite himself.

The old treehouse is stocked with food, and she tosses most of it down to land in the swampy water around it, ignoring his muttered complaints about having to fish it out again.

She also manages to shoot down a few sizable stingwings from her vantage point on the roof, so Max gets something good for dinner too.

That night by the fire, she hums happily to herself as she breaks off pieces of meat and feeds them to Max with her fingers, and Frank falls asleep smiling. Doesn’t have any of the usual nightmares, either.

* * *

Another time, a less happy memory, he smashes his boot on the ground, smashing the Dogs of Hell bastard’s head into the dirt, skull caved in. Karen lurches to her feet, clutching her side, exhaling heavily. Shakily.

“How many stimpacks we got left?” she asks. He jabs her with one before he answers.

“That was the last of them,” he says. She shoves him away with a curse, her side already healing up nice.

“Then you save it! Fuck, Frank! What if someone gets really hurt next time?”

“We got a Dogs of Hell hideout filled with warm bodies,” Frank says impatiently. “You think we ain’t gonna find more stims?”

Really he’s realizing with embarrassment that he didn’t even think about it before jamming that needle into her side. The thought of her bleeding out was too much.

It worries him a little. Worries him that he cares like this.

* * *

She’s always getting into trouble like that, even though the whole reason he brought her along was because she was supposed to help him stay out of it. Not that she doesn’t do her own share of sweettalking their way through the wasteland. And she’s always good to get him out of the trouble he gets _himself_ into. He cleans her up a nice sniper rifle they found in an abandoned house, and for the most part he wades into the shit while she provides cover, but half the time he’ll turn around and she’s beating a guy back with her gun, two feet from him.

“Got your back, Castle,” she always says.

“Yes ma’am,” he always replies.

* * *

One time, they find a pre-war bunker and spend two days living large off rehydrated rations and vodka. She laughs so hard at his impression of her that she nearly throws all that alcohol up again.

They end up spending the night wound together on the bunker’s only mattress, her blonde hair tucked against his chin, her arm pulled tight across his waist.

Sometimes when he looks at her, he has trouble swallowing. Like there’s a lump in his throat. And it’s not just because her hair makes him think of Maria. Not anymore.

* * *

Claire was right about her sweettalking, too. Half the times they square up don’t even end with blood because she’s talking people into putting down their guns.

Though the one time a guy suggests she bribe him with something a little extra, Frank loses his cool and that whole thing gets blown to shit.

It’s worth it. Of course it’s worth it. And not only because of the secret smile she gives him for two straight days, every time she tucks her hair behind her ears the way she does.

* * *

She teaches him how to cook, too. She reckons Maria must have done it all back before she died, and she rolls her eyes at him every time he doesn’t know how to figure out some new fucked up plant they’ve come across. He grimaces when he thinks of the laugh Maria would have let out to hear that; give him a steak and some pasta and he can cook anything, but he’s pretty sure even two hundred years gone people are telling stories about that time Maria somehow burned a fucking fruit salad. But Karen is a whiz with these new mutated animals, teaches him the best parts and the parts that’d kill you if you ate them. And eventually they cook all their meals together, side-by-side, and it’s…nice. It’s nice.

It’s all nice, is the problem. He kind of forgets it’s all a lie. Kind of forgets to tell her exactly where he’s from. When he’s from.

* * *

They make the call to stop back at the Kitchen when the Albany thing turns out to be a bust. But on the road back, a few days away, they meet a ghoul who has an in with the Upper East, the wealthy ghoul community Karen thinks might have Lisa. Karen does what Karen does best, and she makes them a friend and secures them an invite for when they get back from the Kitchen. Frank should be happy, should think _this is it_.

But it’s been months of this, and he still feels like he’s no closer to his baby than he was.

“It’s a good lead, Frank,” Karen says as they enter the Kitchen. She’s tired but smiling, and he knows she’s glad to stop off and see her friends. He’s glad he convinced her they should. They left Max with Microchip to heal up, and that’s another reason Frank’s feeling itchy, but maybe he should have been more careful because it goes wrong as soon as they’re inside.

There’s this fat guy in a white suit, and Karen freezes, and she reaches for Frank so reflexively it’s like she’s done it a hundred times, though he can’t remember her ever reaching out for anything. Her fingers touch his wrist, lightly, insistently, without looking at him, and he knows there’s about to be some trouble.

“Mr. Castle,” the man says shortly, smiling. He has a creepy, monotone voice, and Frank has never disliked someone so quickly. “Or should I call you The Punisher? Mr. Punisher?”

“Frank,” Frank says.  The fat man smiles without showing his teeth.

“Frank. I’m Wilson Fisk, the mayor of this town. And I just wanted to thank you personally for bringing Miss Page back to us.”

Alarm bells ringing dimly in Frank’s mind.

“Just a quick visit,” he says, eyes darkening. Fisk doesn’t seem threatened. Doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that Frank’s nickname is The Punisher, either. Fisk’s surrounded by men, six at least, but Frank’s still thinking he needs a bit of a demonstration.

“Unfortunately, I think Miss Page will be staying quite a bit longer than that.”

“No,” Karen says firmly, glaring at Fisk over the rims of her glasses, standing with her back straight. She looks ready to fight if she has to, and Frank is glad. He’s ready to fight too. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fisk, but I’m leaving.”

“My dear, trust me. I don’t like the unsavory business you bring into this town, but it _is_ business. And we need the money. It’s simple.”

“I can give you caps,” Karen sneers.

“I mean a steady source of income, Miss Page. Your little show helped us rake in the caps on a consistent basis.”

“The show never made that much money,” Karen shoots back. “So what do you really want?”

The exhausted way in which she asks the question makes his jaw clench. Fisk just keeps smiling.

“It didn’t take me very long to determine that the rumors must be true. About a secret vault under Central Park. One that has remained undisturbed for centuries. But imagine my surprise when I heard that the one and only Punisher was one of its occupants. In fact, its sole surviving occupant! Why, the undisturbed technology in that vault alone would be worth millions of caps. Particularly if, as the rumors say, you had been cryogenically frozen since the world ended. Two hundred years, am I correct?”

Karen’s looking at him now, her eyes wide with disbelief. But what’s he gonna do, lie? She would see through it.

“That’s right,” he says. Karen’s eyes fill quickly with tears, and she looks away, and he hates that she so quickly feels betrayed by this. If he had known it would be a big deal…

_Bullshit_ , a voice inside his head counters. _You had every opportunity to bring it up. One of those nights when you two were lying there, looking up at the stars, not saying anything, or saying shit but not really talking about anything._ He could’ve told her. Could’ve told her any time she teased him about not knowing what a Yao Gui was or how to tell that Molerats were nearby. Or when he described to her in painful detail the thing he saw in the subway that time, and she laughed and couldn’t believe he had never seen a feral ghoul before.

He figures she’s probably running over all those moments in her head right now too.

“I can see that Miss Page is surprised to hear this,” Fisk says, reveling in it. Frank glowers, his jaw twitching again.

“What do you want? You want me to take you there? And then you’ll let her go?”

“I would very much like for you to take me there,” Fisk replies.


	4. Mighty, Mighty Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank takes Karen and Fisk to the vault.

It’s not like they’re technically under guard. No one’s pointing guns at their backs as they walk. No one trying to tie their hands together with rope. But they both know exactly where they stand; Fisk has six people with them, all with guns, and Frank and Karen are out in front, leading the way. Frank also doesn’t like that Fisk never answered him about letting Karen go.

As they pick their way through raider territory, Frank mulls over what to say to her. It hasn’t been this difficult to figure out for a while, not since the beginning of their friendship. Partnership. Whatever.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally, under his breath. Karen doesn’t look at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks. It’s more a whisper than anything else, but he hears it over the crunch of old concrete under his boot, the crumbling remains of some once-majestic skyscraper.

“Claire told me to keep it to myself. Figured there were people who’d do what Fisk’s doing now.”

“I’m not Fisk,” Karen fires back. Hisses, “you should have told me. I could have helped you.”

“What? You were.”

“God, it all makes sense. Calling me ma’am all the time, like someone out of a radio show. You always know what old buildings used to be called, and you knew where that old factory was even though it wasn’t on any of our maps, but you lost your shit the first time you saw a fucking radroach. I’m such an idiot.”

“C’mon, don’t do that. I was gonna tell you.”

“When, Frank?”

“Eventually.”

“Well, things are gonna get hairy in there, Frank. Fisk has no intention of letting us go.”

“Figured as much.”

“I think he might know I…”

“Enough chatter!” Fisk shouts suddenly from farther down the street. Karen falls silent, her face flushing bright red. Anger, Frank realizes, at being yelled at. But her hands tremble when she pushes her hair back from her face. He feels his own fists clench when he realizes how scared she is. He wishes he could find some words to comfort her, but she looks at him out of the corner of her eye like he’s this thing she doesn’t know how to figure out, and he finds his words dying on his lips.

* * *

The old subway station is exactly where he remembers it being, and he leads Fisk down into the dark, leads the way down the tracks to the tunnel with the elevator access. Fisk laughs with delight when he sees the blinking light on the panel, the elevator still functional after all this time.

Fisk takes Karen’s elbow as soon as they enter. Three of his men stay above. The threat is clear. Karen’s teeth grit together, and he can tell that Fisk is hurting her, but she won’t say anything. Too proud, like him.

He’s gonna break Fisk’s fingers for this. That’s his godddam partner the man is hurting.

He doesn’t want to enter the vault, is hoping Fisk will be satisfied with being shown where it is, but Fisk advises him to go first, and Frank does, and everything is completely untouched. Frank’s hesitant as he steps forward, as he looks around the entrance, seeing the rooms filled with cryo tubes ahead and knowing that Maria’s is just down the hall. She’ll still be there. Will she still look the same? Or did the power outage mean she would be rotted away like everything else from before?

“We can lock them in the overseer’s office while we work,” says Fisk. “Keep them out of the way. Sweep it first. Clean it out. We don’t want any nasty surprises from Miss Page.”

Two men go down the hall to do Fisk’s bidding, and they seem like they know exactly where they’re going. Frank supposes most of the vaults must look the same. Supposes they must have come across a whole bunch in a city this big.

“I can’t tell you how exciting this is,” Fisk says conversationally, as if he isn’t gripping Karen tight enough to bruise. “To be standing here. It’s all so untouched.”

“Not completely untouched,” Frank points out.

“Right, of course. The men who entered and stole your child. Killed your wife. My condolences. Actually, we might be able to help you with that. I’m quite good with these old computers, you know. I did a lot of studying when I was a child. I can see what information I can get you. Maybe camera surveillance.”

“That right?”

“That’s right, Frank. A partnership here would be mutually beneficial to us both.”

“Why? What do I bring to the table?”

“Protection. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is on our side for now, but there’s a lot he doesn’t know, and I’ve been preparing for the eventuality of his…downfall.”

“Sounds a lot like you’re going to try and kill the Devil,” Karen says, and Fisk wrenches her arm. She doesn’t make a sound, but Frank watches her lips go pale and bloodless when she bites them together. His trigger finger is twitching a mile a minute now.

“Now, Miss Page, this doesn’t concern you. This is business between me and Mr. Castle.”

“Concerns her because I already got a partner,” Frank says. “And right now you’re causing her an awful lot of discomfort. I’d rather you didn’t.”

Fisk smiles at him and releases Karen, spreading his hands in a defensive gesture as Karen moves quickly back over to stand beside Frank, her eyes hard and glazed over. She still isn’t happy with him, but he’s an ally in this.

“Consider your options,” Fisk says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Frank’s quiet, decides not to say a word, and eventually Fisk gives up, lets his men take Frank and Karen away.

* * *

In the overseer’s office, they’re left alone with nothing but the bones of the colonel, and Frank’s expecting more anger from Karen. More pain. Instead she goes immediately to the far wall and rips open a panel he didn’t notice the first time he was in here.

“The hell are you doing?” he asks.

“This isn’t my first rodeo” Karen says with a smirk over her shoulder. “Isn’t theirs, either, but I’m good at finding places I shouldn’t find. Every overseer’s office has something behind his wall. A safe, or a secret room or…” she fiddles with something tucked into the panel, and it sparks to life, a door sliding open right in front of them. A caged room is beyond it, a gun glistening in some sort of stasis. There’s a safe in the floor, too. All of it untouched. Karen grins at him again.

“To quote my good friend Elektra: I’m a genius.”

“No arguments here. Think you can pick that lock?”

Karen rolls her eyes towards him, pulling a bobby pin out of her hair.

“Stupid question,” she says.

* * *

The gun she hands him is a cryo gun. Some experimental weapon the assholes running this vault worked on while he and a hundred other people slept in stasis. Karen hands the gun to him with an eyebrow quirk of judgement that doesn’t go unnoticed by him. But he takes it. What else is he supposed to do? She’s right. He should have told her.

For herself, she takes the shitty, rust covered pistol she found in the safe. She’s always doing shit like this, taking the worse gun because she likes to prove she can shoot with anything.

“You know I’m a sniper too, right?” he’ll say, and she’ll scoff, pushing her hair out of her eyes as she glances down the sights.

“They don’t call you Bullseye.”

“They only call _you_ Bullseye ‘cus they’re scared of you.”

“Good.”

Actually, it’s kind of funny how painful it is. Thinking he’ll never get to hear that sarcastic laugh again. Because he’s pretty sure that even if they get out of this one, he’s gonna be mostly fucking dead to her.

“He knows what I did,” she says suddenly, looking down at the ground. His finger starts twitching when she looks like that, all vulnerable and scared, even though he knows half the time she looks like that she’s secretly a storm inside. “I can tell. The way he grabbed me. There was anger there. Fisk doesn’t get angry. Only time I’ve ever seen him that way was when someone killed his only friend.”

She looks at him, hollow, and he gives a quiet nod.

“What’d he do?”

Karen snorts at that, pulls her hair back into a quick braid and ties it with a little string at the end. Nervous fidgeting.

“What does anyone in this fucking shithole do?” she asks. “He tried to take what wasn’t his. I took my payment in blood.”

“Classy,” Frank says softly, and he means it, and Karen’s face twists into a smile she clearly wishes wasn’t there.

“Wasn’t really in the business of killing yet. I’d done it before, when I had to. Like most people. But he was the one who got me mad enough to start striking first. Must be hard for you.”

Confused by the change in direction, Frank asks, “hard?”

“Coming from before. Getting here and seeing all the shit. I know there were wars. I’ve read books and all, but…you could go outside and see the green. You could go anywhere without carrying enough ammunition to make it through a week.”

“Yeah. Waking up here was like going back to war. Wasn’t so tough, I guess.”

“Elektra would scoff here and say ‘men’.”

“Yeah? What about men?”

“Always thinking you have to be the strong ones.”

“But you’re not Elektra.”

“Elektra likes to make jokes. We both know who really has to be strong out here.”

“Yeah. I know it too.”

“You don’t always have to be strong, Frank.”

“If I ever said the same to you, you’d laugh in my face.”

“Yeah. But I’d like it anyway. Secret. It’s nice when you don’t have to be so strong.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

* * *

When Fisk’s men come back, Karen and Frank go without issue. The men don’t bother patting them down again, like Karen said they wouldn’t. Frank lets Karen do the talking, though she warns him that he might have to take over once Fisk shows his hand about the Wesley thing.

Turns out no one has to do much talking at all.

Fisk takes them into the cryo room where Frank was reborn. Frank doesn’t want to look, but Karen was right that he feels like he has to be strong here. At least, he has to look it.

He stares straight ahead as Fisk leads them over to the chamber that used to hold Frank. Karen steps closer, her interest clear, and if it was anyone else, Frank thinks that might piss him off, but it feels right for her to see.

“Can you imagine being trapped in there, Miss Page? Being forced to watch your wife die right in front of your eyes?” Fisk is looking at Karen with intense sympathy that doesn’t fool her. She stares straight back at him.

“Get it over with,” she says, her voice weary.

Frank isn’t expecting Fisk to move so quickly. The man looks like he’d break a sweat at a light jog, but he grabs Karen by the throat and shoves her towards Maria’s pod, slamming her against the glass hard enough to crack it. Frank moves to intervene, but Karen holds her hand, palm out, back to him, and he keeps himself in check even though his whole body is aching to do something about this.

Karen’s got one elbow braced against the glass to keep her face from hitting it, and she’s staring down at Maria, her face blank and calm.

“Strange, isn’t it? How much she looks like you?”

“Her eyes were brown,” Karen replies, and Frank sees her reach into her belt for her gun.

They both react together; Frank shoots Fisk and Karen shoots the lackeys, who react too slowly. She’s barely looking and manages headshots. If she was in a better mood, she’d make a joke that might even have Frank laughing.

The cryo gun freezes Fisk in place, and Karen shoves him back, pushing herself away from Maria, and Frank grabs him by the shoulders and pushes him back into the open chamber, the one where he watched his family taken from him.

The gun’s effects don’t last for long, but by the time it wears off, all of Fisk’s men are dead, and Karen and Frank both have their pistols pointed at his head.

“Well,” he says, still in that voice he has. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, leaving a scavenger alone in a room. There’s a saying about that, isn’t there? Or is it leaving a whore alone in a room?”

“I’m gonna hit him,” Frank says, but Karen grabs his arm to stop him, tilting her head to the side at Fisk.

“Kill him. Don’t hit him. He’ll only keep coming if we leave him alive.”

For a moment, Fisk’s oily face is blank with surprise instead of the usual smug elegance. But he recovers quickly.

“If you kill me, you’ll never know where your daughter is,” he says.

“I got a guy who’s good with computers,” Frank says. “We’ll figure it out.”

“How good is he with broken computers?” Fisk asks, lifting a hand to point towards the mainframe computer, which is completely hollowed out, completely destroyed. “You may have taken me by surprise, but don’t think I don’t have my contingencies. I had to plan for Miss Page doing what she does best. I had to plan for you being a stubborn son of a bitch. If you want to know anything about your daughter and the men who took her, you’ll see the sense in what I’m about to say: you work for _me_ now, Mr. Castle.”

“You know where she is. _You know where she is_ ,” Frank says, his teeth grinding together against the fury. He feels Karen’s hand slip off his arm. “Where is she? Tell me where she is.”

“And let you kill me? No, Mr. Castle. We have a lot of work to do before I tell you who took your daughter. A lot of work indeed.”

Frank has never felt so helpless.

Until he turns around and sees that Karen is gone.

He calls her name, expects her to pop up from behind something, new loot clutched in her hands, smiling. But there’s nothing but silence.

And then, in the distance, the sound of the vault elevator whirring to life.

“Smart girl,” Fisk says, pushing Frank back as if this settles it. “She knew what choice you’d make. Of course, I’ll need you to find her for me. She killed someone very important to me. She can’t be allowed to live.”

And it’s almost like Fisk thinks Frank has any choice at all.

“Fuck you,” he growls.

And he pulls the trigger.


	5. Orange Colored Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank goes looking for Karen

He looks for her. He swears she can’t be far, but there’s no sign of her when he leaves the vault, and even when he stands in the middle of central park like a goddamn lunatic, yelling her name, he doesn’t hear a sound.

* * *

Claire looks relieved to see him.

“Fisk knows who you are,” she says, pulling the clinic door wider to let him in, then locking it again behind her.

“Yeah, no shit. Karen here?”

“No. She’s not with you anymore?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We got time.”

“Not if Karen’s not here, we don’t. I have to find her.”

“What’s wrong? Just take a second.” She reaches out her hand suddenly, feels his pulse. “Come here. You need to calm down. Take a drink of water. Sit down.”

He goes reluctantly. Hating it. Letting Claire sit him in a chair that creaks under his weight.

“You didn’t tell, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“They came by asking about you and Karen. Couple of them went by Nelson and Murdock’s. That didn’t go so well for them.”

“Elektra?”

“And Matt.”

“No shit?”

“You haven’t been around here much. Murdock’s a hell of a fighter. There’s a reason Hell’s Kitchen goes pretty much unbothered.”

“The Devil. Yeah, Karen said.”

“Mhm. Murdock in a stupid mask.”

“No shit?”

“Yep.”

“Think he’d be up for helping me find Karen?”

Claire’s look is doubtful, but she says, “might be worth a shot. He seemed real concerned about her when he came by to check after Fisk and the Russians left. Something Fisk said.”

“Fisk was after Karen.”

“Was?”

“He ain’t gonna be looking for anything anymore. Brains are misplaced all over the vault floor. But she thought…she must have thought I’d take his offer.”

“What offer?”

“Fisk knew who killed Maria. Who took my girl. But if I wanted it, I’d have had to let Fisk kill Karen, and I couldn’t do it.”

He clenches his fist, and Claire looks down at it like it means something.

“Knew you two would get along,” she says quietly. “Didn’t realize it’d gotten that bad.”

Frank’s about to argue, blow it off, but it’s like her saying it has opened his eyes just enough.

“Fuck,” he says, and Claire’s answering laugh is a little sad.

“You’re not real good at identifying your emotions, huh? You and me both.”

“I didn’t mean for it…it’s not like I…”

“No explanation needed, big guy. Just do me a favor and let her know that, all right?”

“She thinks I was gonna kill her.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Of fucking course not.”

“Hey, don’t get pissy with me. Listen, I’ve known Karen for a bit now. She’s got a lot of baggage about what she used to do. The chems she used to be addicted to. Never felt like she was worth the trouble Matt and Foggy put into keeping her safe and keeping her around. That girl has a chip on her shoulders bigger than the one you carry around. And that’s a heavy fucking chip. Find her. Let her know what you did. Let her know you ain’t gonna turn her in. Talk to Matt. He might know a hole or two she’d bolt into if she was scared.”

* * *

Matt does not have any idea, but he punches Frank hard as hell when he puts together what’s happened. Frank lets him, even lets him take a second swing, but Elektra steps in and stops the third.

“Matthew!” she scolds. “Didn’t you hear him? He killed Fisk. He killed him. That’s wonderful news.”

“Murder is never wonderful news,” Matt replies stiffly, and Elektra scoffs, waves him off.

“Karen has been terrified for months that Fisk would come after her. Now she doesn’t have to worry. So stop punching the man. Did Karen come to see you before she left?”

Matt doesn’t want to answer, which Elektra and Frank both know is a yes.

“Please,” Frank says. Begging is not a good sound on him, he doesn’t think. But Matt’s blind eyes turn toward him, sympathy flashing across his thin mouth. “I…I gave up finding out where my baby is. I’m not tryna convince you I’m good for her. I’m just tryna let you know I’d do anything for Karen.”

“Matt,” Elektra says quietly. “Matt, please. Tell him. I hate to even say this, but you know she can’t be out there on her own.”

“That’s not Karen anymore,” Matt says shortly. “She wouldn’t just throw away all that hard work to get clean.”

“It’s not that simple. You’ve never understood that, I know, and I know you’re annoyed with me for saying this. But you need to let Frank find her.”

Matt stubbornly stays silent, and Frank’s thinking he’ll have to go out in the Wasteland and search every goddamn borough for her – and he fucking _will_ – but then Matt sighs.

“She said she took a look at the overseer’s computer. Found your old address. She has some idea of where your daughter is.”

“She’s gonna try to get all the way out there on her own?”

“I think she wants to get as far from here as possible,” Matt says pointedly, and Frank grabs his pack from the ground. “Frank! If you don’t find her, if anything happens to her…we’re gonna have some problems.”

Frank doesn’t respond, doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t bother telling Matt that if he doesn’t find Karen, there’s no way in hell he’s coming back to the Kitchen.

* * *

It takes him four days to reach his old place. A drive that barely took an hour before the bombs fell takes him four days, because he has to keep going around things he can’t take down on his own. He has to stop and help people, too. Can feel Karen’s judgmental stare every time he considers leaving them to take care of themselves; she always was a bleeding heart.

Four days. He asks about her everywhere he meets someone who feels like talking instead of just instigating a firefight. A few scavengers say they watched her take on a pair of raiders with nothing but a rusty knife, and he wonders what happened to her gun. Feels like his gut is being punched when they say she was bleeding from her mouth, that she declined their offers of help with a politeness made eerie by the red dribbling down her chin.

She’s out in this shit alone. She’s been out in this shit alone, has seemingly lived her whole damn life in this shit alone, but now it’s different. He should be with her.

Four days feels like forever, and when he finally reaches the spot where his neighborhood used to be, and he stands at the top of his street and looks down at the ruins of his neighbors’ houses and sees no movement in the dying afternoon light, no settlers or raiders or scavengers or _anything_ , he can’t find the strength to go on for almost twenty minutes. He can’t do this again. And after four days of walking, of searching, of hoping, he’s at the end.

Even when he was saying the words to Claire, it didn’t hit him like it does now. He loves Karen. He loves the dumb little glasses she wears and the way she peeks over them at him when he says something she’s judging him for. He loves the way she never fails to light up when she finds something fun from Before. Old board games and stuffed animals and brightly colored toys gone only slightly decayed from years of use. He loves the way she laughs at him when he’s trying to be dignified about something embarrassing that’s just happened to him, like the time he wiped out, sliding on a slick trail of feral ghoul blood, and stood there covered in slime while she giggled away. He loves her quiet strength, the way she gets tense if they’re dealing with some scumbag who knows how to use her past against her, and he loves the way she never hesitates to put those people down.

It has only been four days, but he misses her the way he missed Maria in the beginning. The way he misses Lisa all the time. This essential piece missing from his heart, keeping him from functioning right.

He starts walking. One foot in front of the other. He dreads reaching the end.

* * *

His house is weathered, holes in the siding and rust flaking off most of the blue paint, but he can still see the way it used to be, and it’s like everything until this point has been one long nightmare, and this is the thing that makes it real. Being around something that’s familiar. That he _knows_ should look a certain way, and seeing it like this.

The door opens easily enough, hinges squealing, and he enters the kitchen with his hand to his mouth to quell the sobs that start to rise when he sees it.

Someone has been here recently. Has cleaned the crumbling countertops. Has pulled up the weeds and grass that must have been growing through the spots in the floor where you can see dirt. The furniture is mostly destroyed, but it’s cleaned off and arranged, and there are a few cans of food out on the counter.

The whole house is like that. Destroyed but pieced together again, as much as you can piece a thing like this back together again.

Lisa’s room is like that too.

He sits down next to the moldering crib, leans his back against it, and cries. Cries for a good long time. For the first time since he woke up and everything was gone, he just lets himself do it. He’s crying for everything, for everyone he knew before, for Maria and Lisa and Karen, too. Crying for all the people he couldn’t save and the ones he won’t be able to save tomorrow.

He’s sure that Karen isn’t here, that she saw him coming and took off. Kept running. But after giving him some time alone, he hears her in the doorway. He raises his face from his hands and sees her leaning against the doorframe, his gun that he put down in the living room in her hand. She’s got one arm wrapped around her side, favoring it, and he can see blood dripping down her thigh from a nasty gash that tore through one of her stockings.

“Who told you I was here?” she asks. “Was it Matt?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck. _Fuck._ Listen, I’ve figured it out…”

“Hey, c’mon. C’mere, no, I didn’t…”

“I can’t go back there. I can’t. You don’t understand what he does. The bodies when he’s done with them, it’s…”

“I didn’t take the deal, Karen. C’mon.”

His defeated tone shuts her up, and she lowers the shotgun, adjusting her weight, not knowing what to say.

“What?” she asks, her voice a harsh whisper.

“Shot him in the fucking head the second he suggested I go get you and bring you back to him.”

“Oh.”

It’s the only thing she says for a while. She just stares at him, and he stares back, and he doesn’t look away the way he normally does.

“You really thought I’d do it?” he asks. His voice is hoarse from the crying. Still a little shaky, and she seems to remember where they are suddenly. She’s always been good at recognizing his moods. Something she’d learned from all those years trying to stay out of peoples’ way. Keep them from hurting her. He hates this world.

“Yes,” she finally says. “Of course I did.”

“I’m gonna do everything I can to find her, Karen. But I ain’t gonna hurt you to do it. And I ain’t gonna let anyone else hurt you either. We’re fucking partners.”

“Oh, Frank,” she sighs, and she drops the gun against the wall and she drops to her knees beside him and pulls him into a hug, wrapping her arms around him tight. “Oh, Frank. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He hugs her back, relief coursing through him because she’s real. She’s real, and she’s here, and she’s all right.

“You ain’t had a lot of people to watch your back, I gather. Not people who wouldn’t turn around on you if the caps were right. Just Murdock and the others. I can’t blame you. When I never told you about who I was and all.”

Karen just squeezes him tighter and buries her face in his shoulder.

“That’s not the only reason I’m sorry,” she whispers.

* * *

It takes her a while to get it all out. She’s nervous, her hands fluttering over his wrist as she enters the coordinates into his Pipboy.

“What’s that?” he asks as the new marker shows up on the very edge of the map. This little village a ways out. Farther than he’s been since he woke up. “That’s an old military base, isn’t it?”

“I think…I think that’s where your daughter is,” she says. “Or where she was.”

“What do you mean _was_?” Frank asks, and Karen hesitates.

“I took the drive from the Overseer’s terminal before we left the room. Figured at the time you might be able to get Micro to take a look at it. When I went off on my own, I took it to him. He wasn’t able to find much. Just your old address, which I already knew, but he was able to point me to it on a map. And then he opened this list of times the terminal was accessed. And the last three times caught my eye. I don’t think he noticed, or maybe he just kept it to himself not realizing I could read what the numbers meant. I don’t know. But the last three times that terminal powered up were the day we were in the vault, the day you woke up, and once, fifty years ago.”

Frank pulls back from the hug and stares at her, trying to figure out what she’s saying and why she sounds so goddamn sorry to say it.

“Fifty years ago?”

“Until then, there was nothing since a few years after the bombs fell. And those were regular. More than once a day for years. And then nothing. Everyone must have been dead by then. But then fifty years ago, someone accessed the logs. They accessed your wife’s file.”

“Fifty years ago,” Frank says again. “Oh, Christ.”

“I think…I think they wanted the baby. I don’t know what for, but I think they took her, and they put you back under when your wife died. I think the cryo stasis was turned off when the power was cut. I don’t know why you were the only one to survive. Best I can figure is that someone let you out as they cut the power. Let you out remotely. That’s- that’s where the map point comes in. See, there was a remote access the day you woke up. Micro didn’t even know that was possible. At first he figured it was some sort of attack, but then he thought…Frank?”

“Yeah, yeah. Fifty…fuck.”

He hangs his head again, and Karen clings to him once more, pulling his head to her shoulder and letting him have a few moments of grief.

“I’m so sorry.”

“What’re the odds of a person even making it to fifty out here?”

“It happens.”

“Right.”

“But I’m saying, Frank, that someone woke you up. Someone at that military installation. Maybe…fuck, maybe she’s still out there. Maybe she found out where she came from and she found a way to get you out! Frank, there’s a chance.”

Frank sighs and closes his eyes. Lets memories play behind his eyelids for a while.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll head there. Ain’t gonna ask you to come with me…”

“But I will.”

“It’s off the edge of the map. Who the fuck knows what’s even out there? And it’s _far_. We don’t even know what kind of food we’ll be able to find.”

“I know.”

“And those names on your list ain’t gonna wait around forever.”

“There will always be more, Frank. And when we come back this way, we can take on my shit together. You hired me on to find your daughter. I mean to finish the job.”

Stubborn as always. Frank is deliriously glad for it.

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. I’m going with you.”

Frank smiles at her. Soft and close as she is, it makes sense for him to lean in and kiss her, but he doesn’t. Always told himself he wouldn’t make the first move. But _she_ does it anyhow, she leans in and captures his mouth.

“I want this,” she says against him before he can ask if she’s sure. “I’ve wanted this for weeks.”

Frank smirks as he kisses her back. Kisses her hard. Kisses her for all the times he wished he could have when they were on the road.

Tomorrow it’ll be back to this wasteland. Back to this world he hates so much but for the few good people he’s met and but for the ease with which he’s adapted to this endless war. Tomorrow they’ll be on the road and they’ll be looking for Lisa, if she’s even still alive out there.

Tomorrow, though. For now, Karen pulls away from the kiss, rests her head against his shoulder. And they sit there, propped against Lisa’s ancient crib, and they watch the brilliant sunset through the rusted window frame, and Frank feels something like happiness. Something like contentment. For the first time since going off to war, Frank feels like he might be at peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read this! 
> 
> Just as a note, the chapter titles (and the title of the story) are all songs from the Fallout 4 soundtrack.


End file.
